Privatizing public goods shifts their cost disproportionately onto women

Evidence

The intensification occurs through the shrinking, privatization, and/or dismantling of public infrastructure supporting families, children, and retirees. Such infrastructure includes, but is not limited to affordable, quality early childhood and afterschool programs, summer camps, physical and mental health care, education, public transportation, neighborhood parks and recreation centers, public pensions, senior centers, and social security. When these public provisions are eliminated or privatized, the work and/or the cost of supplying them is returned to individuals, disproportionately to women. … In this respect, familialism is an essential requirement, rather than an incidental feature of the neoliberal privatization of public goods and services. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 207

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the reader’s ‘On Sacrifice’ article — the invisible, unremunerated feminized labor of social reproduction as a form of ongoing, institutionalized sacrifice.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in austerity/neoliberalism eroding citizenship — the gendered dimension of infrastructure dismantling is central to that critique. — connects to: Privatizing state services produces bifurcated access to social goods — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1742; Neoliberalism forces women into a double bind of either self-capitalization or invisibility — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 205; Neoliberal states shift the cost of reproducing human capital onto individuals — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 72 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Privatizing state services produces bifurcated access to social goods #expands (0.90) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1742
• Neoliberal states shift the cost of reproducing human capital onto individuals #expands (0.85) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 72
• Neoliberalism forces women into a double bind of either self-capitalization or invisibility #qualifies (0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 205
• Capital depends on unpaid female reproductive labour outside the factory #qualifies (0.75) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 119